Nice headline, right? Well, I speak the truth people. If you take away the songs "Stranglehold" (about killing your girlfriend), "Cat Scratch Fever" (about screwing anything that moves), and "Free-For-All" (a song about partying for the sake of partying), Ted Nugent has accomplished very little for being in the music business since the late 1960s. This has not stopped him from criticizing far more talented and accomplished people, and attacking them for not "working" as hard as he does, or for not sharing the same far-right, extremist philosophies and values that he does.Someone at the Wall St. Journal thought it would be a good idea to give "The Nuge" a platform in their paper and offer him an op-ed. The article is here (subscription required). Rolling Stone offers a summary here.
I won't go point-by-point and refute all of the nonsense that this aging wash-out has written, as that would be giving him far more of my time than he deserves. But I just thought I'd take on this one comment that really demanded a response from someone. Please note: I am no fan of hippies, especially the rich, college kids who pretend to be hippies for a 4 or 5 year period and then resume their lives as future bankers or CPAs or whatever. However, the "originals" from the 60s deserve more than to be dismissed as drugged out, anti-American, cowards.
“Turned off by the work ethic and productive American Dream values of their parents, hippies instead opted for a cowardly, irresponsible lifestyle of random sex, life-destroying drugs and mostly soulless rock music that flourished in San Francisco.”
Ted, hippies were not turned off by the "work ethic" of their parents, they were turned off by being consistently lied to by their government and forced to fight in a war that they viewed as unjust and unnecessary (Vietnam, where Ted did not serve). They were further "turned off" by the right-wing's refusal to accept civil rights, and their continued resistance to allowing blacks to realize the American Dream that they had been denied for hundreds of years prior. As far as the "cowardly, irresponsible lifestyle of random sex..." thing goes, aren't you calling the kettle black, Mr. Pot? How many children have you had out of wedlock, Ted? How many times have you been married? 3, 4, 5? How many groupies whose names you never learned did you screw in the 70s? or 80s? How many times have you been treated for STDs? Unless, you are liar, Ted, I see this as a highly hypocritical comment coming from you.
The drugs? Well, I know "The Nuge" has always been sober and that is admirable. But maybe if he weren't, his music would be more listenable. Soulless rock music?! As opposed to what, "Little Miss Dangerous" by Ted "I am actually quite black" Nugent?! You are the king of soulless rock music, my friend.
I won't even get into Ted's indefensible worship of George W. Bush and his bloodlust for killing animals. Those are topics for another day. But, when Ted Nugent becomes an authority on music and cultural history, I feel a need to contribute to that dialog.
I live in San Francisco and Ted is right. The human detritus from the 1960's is still here. They are homeless now, walking around with shopping carts and mumbling to themselves.
ReplyDeleteI think about how great things were before their generation took over and I have no pity. We lost so much.
I follow the news pretty closely Keith and I never heard that homeless, mentally ill burnouts from the 1960s "took over" San Francisco. Nancy Pelosi is a powerful person from the Bay Area. How did she get so powerful when she's not homeless?
ReplyDeleteYeah, I really miss those days. Women knew their place, blacks knew their place, Latinos knew their place, Asians knew their place, Jews knew their place, atheists knew their place, gays knew their place, we believed everything the government/military told us, everybody smoked cigarettes everywhere...
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